European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Interlanguage Pragmatic Development In Native Speaker/Nonnative Speaker Participatory Online Environments, Adrienne Gonzales

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This dissertation seeks to discover the ways in which participation in an online social networking site affects interlanguage pragmatic development. Livemocha is an online social network centered around language learning that emphasizes the collaboration required in constructing language. This social networking site encourages learners to establish an identity through their user profiles and to reach out to other members through email, text-based chat, video chat, or peer-reviewed lessons. This study examines interaction in text-based chat between native speakers (NSs) and language learners of Spanish in this environment. Conversations were collected from seven participants over the course of one academic year …